Thursday, November 14, 2013

Put A Little Effort Into It

Welcome to
the holiday season. It means we’re all
going to have to try a lot harder. At a
lot of things. Like finding time to write. And losing weight.

This week’s
little rant was inspired by Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling. They’ve been floating around the web for a
few years now, ever since one of the storyboard artists there tweeted
them. I recently stumbled across a nice rendering of them here and they got me thinking about something I was
talking about just before Halloween.

Before I go
over that, though, let’s go over some basics.

One of the
elemental principles of storytelling is the obstacle. It's what
stands between my protagonist and whatever it is they want. Social cliques and jealous jocks separate
Wakko from the cheerleader he wants to ask to the prom. An army of mercenaries are keeping Yakko from
the missile silo. Financial hardship is
keeping Dot from opening her hair salon. Well, financial hardship and a lack of
self-confidence.

Now, while
you may have heard the term obstacle, or perhaps even conflict, my personal
preference here on the ranty blog is to call all these things challenges.
I think there are a few standard rules to challenges, and I’ve gone over those in the past, but I wanted to bring up a new one. It’s kind of an overall corollary to
challenges that touches on a lot of those rules.

My
character has to try.

To be
specific, when I say my character has to try, I’m saying this challenge should
actually require effort. It needs to be
difficult, because if it isn’t, it isn’t really a challenge. If I don’t have to try, what’s the
point?

Vin Diesel
beating up a third grader doesn’t impress anyone. Neither does Usain Bolt outrunning a guy on
crutches. If I put Kate Upton in glasses
and a baggy sweatshirt, it’s still not believable that she’d be saying “oh,
wow, how will I find a date for Saturday?”
No, not even if I make her a
brunette and then mess her hair up. This
is also why uber-prepared or godlike characters very rarely work. We’re just not impressed by people we know
will succeed, because success in and of itself is meaningless in a story.

You see, I’m going to go out on a
limb here and say Pixar missed it with their #1 rule. Okay, granted, I’m pretty sure there is no
real order to the list, but my point is this...

Y’see,
Timmy, exterior success is irrelevant.
Despite what Yoda taught us all, trying is the important part. We
like to see characters who make an effort, who aspire, who reach past their
limits. If they never do—if everything
my characters do is within their comfort zone—then they’re not worth reading
about.

If Wakko
needs to deal with those jocks to talk to cheerleader Phoebe, the ones who’ve
bullied him since freshman year, the important part isn’t him beating them up
or even getting past them. It’s when he
stands up to them. If he does fight back
and somehow wins, that’s icing on the cake, but the important moment is when he
decides he’s not going to be bullied anymore. That’s the victory that matters.

That’s when
we all love him and when he becomes somebody worth reading about.

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-----RANDOM FACTS-----

PETER CLINES is a generations-back New Englander (we're talking tall hats and buckled shoes and half-the-population-dies-every-winter generations-back) who broke with tradition and moved to Southern California.

After more than thirty years of writing, fifteen years in the film industry, and six years of writing about writing for the film industry, plus getting several short stories and a novel or nine published, he feels he has some experience and useful advice to offer.